Montgomery County residents who sought help from the county during last month’s snowstorms often were told to call their County Council members for aid, despite having their calls secretly routed to a new state-of-the-art customer service call center that should have been a one-stop shop for residents’ problems.
“We were getting quite a few calls,” Council Vice President Valerie Ervin, D-Silver Spring, said at a council hearing Tuesday about the county’s response to the snowstorms.
The call center is part of an $80 million modernization effort county officials hope will make county government more responsive to residents’ needs. When fully operational, county officials say, the center will allow residents to call one number, 311, and get help with a variety of needs — instead of having to call individual agencies.
Nearly two years in the making, the center is set to open officially this month but is already being used in what’s called a “soft launch.” Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Tom Street said the call center is still trying to improve and acknowledged that it is “experiencing a number of problems.”
Street said residents were told to call their County Council members because the county employees who volunteered to work at the center during the storms had received only “minimal” training.
Errors at the call center were one of several snow-related problems that the County Council reviewed Tuesday. County staff said snow removal cost an estimated $60 million for the entire winter, with last month’s storms costing about $40 million.
Several residents wrote angry letters to the council asking why their streets weren’t plowed several days after the storms while neighbors’ streets had been plowed multiple times.
County officials said they did their best to plow all county streets during the epic snowfalls and tried to quickly address any mistakes that were made.
“Were there some streets missed? Yes,” said Keith Compton, chief of the county’s Division of Highway Services.
But in general, County Council members were effusive with their praise of the county’s efforts.
